Friday 27 June 2014

Mobilising communities to find solutions for themselves (aka CommUniLAB)

On Wednesday Surrey Connects held an annual conference with three outstanding speakers, and it was inspirational  to hear them.  

Mathew Taylor is CEO of the Royal Society of Arts and he gave a discourse in political philosophy the like of which I have not heard since my days at the LSE. His theme was about how we can all be empowered to be creative because the technology of the internet and digital/information economy enables this. He cited the way in which young people are embracing becoming entrepreneurs/sole traders; how folk could reach out to global markets and so on. The barriers to this world are own culture (what Erich Fromm called “The Fear of Freedom”), traditional institutions holding on to power, and related to this a lack of fairness and creativity especially in relation to having capital which he saw as an important enabling resource. He commended the work of Charles Leadbetter and his phrase about the (political ) future resting with “Creative communities with a cause”, and of roles in “mobilising communities to find solutions for themselves”.

As someone who wrote an MPhil research degree (1996-2000) about organisations as networks, not hierarchies, this was music to my ears.

Neil McInroy is CEO of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. He spoke of the inter-dependence between the social (charity)economy – public economy  - private economy, and the need for people in business to see themselves in a wider(community ) context – what he called “business citizens”.

In short these two speakers put forward  a superb rationale for our CommUniLAB project, which enables these linkages and networks to be made in relation to community causes.

The third speaker was Sue Riddlestone, CEO of Bioregional talking in practical terms about “One planet earth” – we consume three times what planet earth can sustain.

On Tuesday, I gave a talk at a breakfast meeting at Foxhills about “Managing across the digital generations”, making the point that I have also stated in “Young Surrey : Strategic Review” that as people work longer, so larger organisations will have employees from across 4 generations - Baby boomers like me, then Generations X, Y and Z- the latter being today’s teenagers of current university students. They all have different values, life experiences,  skills and expectations, so how do you manage across the generations? Secondly how can Generation Z also called the citizen Generation be enabled to enter the world of working?

One of my concerns is that if today’s young people don’t vote at the forthcoming elections they will continue to be disempowered; this speaks to Mathew Taylor’s point. Consider for example the Arab Spring – enabled by Twitter, Blackberry etc as a community movement, but now traditional forces/institutions have re- asserted power.

We are making progress on organising a conference in November, probably at Royal Holloway College on what the Government calls Youth Social Action, and this will include inputs on what citizenship means.

On Wednesday, I had lunch with my fellow directors of Surrey Youth Enterprise, and with one of our Trustees about the future of the enterprise  which was very encouraging.

For the rest I have been working on preparing our papers for Pqasso external assessment, and am grateful to colleagues from Allianz (walking the walk as business citizens already) for their help in this.

Under attack from my wife again for lacking emotional intelligence (humph!!) brought about by too much theology (impossible) and World Cup football(possible) , and so have been blitzing novels by Anita Shreeve, and watching Wallender – brilliant study of the impact of Alzheimers. I’ll be playing squash and going to the gym this week-end, and don’t forget folks Nanny (state) says “drink water!” – a revelation!”

          Mike 

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